This issue is not about sloth or malice. It’s about too much appearing equally urgent, and the information coming at you in a torrent of requests, deadlines, updates, and to-do list items. If you are new to the work, there is a way you can get into the bad habit of responding to things quickly without ever actually deciding what they are. The net result is spending a whole day moving, but not actually controlling anything.
If you want to get better at prioritizing, you do not need to be doing more. You need to start being more deliberate about what should be done first, what should be done later, and what can’t be done at all until other things are handled first. A great way to practice this is on a small project of six to eight tasks. Take each task and write it out in plain language. Then look at it and ask yourself two questions. What will actually move this project forward? What will block another task if I leave it undone? Just because you see something or because something annoys you, doesn’t mean it should necessarily be first. You may need to polish a status report, but you might actually need to confirm the requirements or get approval of the draft more, because other things are dependent on them. You will start to prioritize better when you stop looking at tasks in terms of their noise and start looking at them in terms of their consequences.
Another common error is prioritizing solely based on urgency. New project managers have a tendency to push the task with the closest deadline to the top of the list, without necessarily validating if the task is ready to be worked on yet. This can result in rushing, missed dependencies, and a lot of unnecessary rework. A simple fix is to take a moment before you prioritize the next thing, and ask yourself if that task is actually ready to be worked on. If you can’t do something because you are missing information, or a review, or another task isn’t done yet, then maybe the thing you need to prioritize is the removal of that obstacle. It’s a subtle shift, but it will help you move from reactive to proactive.
A short 15-minute exercise you can use to help practice this is to use triage. Take 5 minutes and read through the tasks in your project, and mark those things that will have a direct impact this week. Take the next five and organize them into three buckets: things I must do now, things I can do soon, things I am waiting on. Take the last five minutes and re-write the top three things into concrete steps instead of general goals. Instead of “handle launch prep,” try “confirm final copy,” “check on approval status,” “send updated timeline.” This will start to teach you how to separate out what’s pressuring you from what’s a priority, which can be one of the harder early skills to master.
Another tip, when you’re not sure what to prioritize, take a closer look at the wording of the tasks. Sometimes the priorities are unclear because the tasks are unclear. It’s really hard to prioritize a broad task, because it’s hard to understand it’s importance or relevance. If you have two tasks that seem like they are relatively equal, look to see if one of them enables progress in a number of other tasks. If so, that is probably the one that you want to tackle first. A good discipline is to only review priorities at a certain time of day, instead of re-prioritizing every single time you get a message. It’s easy to over shift priorities, which makes your decisions weaker. Take a few minutes at the same time every day, and you will make stronger decisions and make the project feel less chaotic.
Finally, one of the best ways to get better at prioritizing is to get feedback. Once you have decided what your priorities are, take a moment and verbalize why you made those choices. If your explanation is weak, your priorities might need another look. You might realize you prioritized something because you found it uncomfortable instead of because it was an important item for the project. Or you might find you placed something first because it was easy to do instead of because it was important to do. Over time, that reflective exercise will help you make stronger decisions under pressure. Prioritizing doesn’t eliminate the complexity from a project, but it does give the complexity a framework that you can work from, change, and trust.